Col. Lang says:" It should be apparent by now that Dick Cheney is touring the Middle East lately for some purpose.
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In Jerusalem the Olmert government seeks an opening to settle its problem with Syria. Bashar Assad seems to want the same thing. Cheney is said to have arrived in Israel with the message that the Bush Administration rejects the conclusions of last year's NIE on Iran in favor of some mysterious and super secret "evidence" that the Israelis supposedly have that contradicts the NIE. Olmert's government is now threatened with removal. What a coincidence!
The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and the forces of information management are doing all they can to beat the drums for further war in the Middle Eastern region.
Now we have the Siniora government (the Sonora government in the Bush pronunciation) in Beirut seeking a confrontation with Hizbullah? We have come to the end of the "fiddling around" in the Lebanon? Have the Jacobins, their Israelis allies and whatever it is that Cheney is, decided to end the suspense and trigger a war on Hizbullah and maybe Syria. We live in interesting times. pl
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al manar have a bizarre story derived from a now suppressed post on the dissident Israeli site Filkka-Israel, concerning two israeli covert ops., both of which were aborted, one to target a top Hezbollah cadre, and the other to blow General Aoun's head off using a booby-trapped camera. I don't think Laura will cover these, somehow.
Sadly, the report appears to be completely uncorroborable : there is no Professor Beni Simon found by english-language Google Search, nor any record of Oded Granot or Zvi Yehezkeli making any statement regarding Jumblatt, either. So, in this case, Laura would be quite correct not to cover it.
What strikes me as ominous is the combination of an offensive posture by Washington along with a proclivity to get involved in the intricate details of local factional politics.
Any external intervention into local factional politics is fraught with danger because of the challenge of understanding the details of local politics. Trying to manipulate factional politics in a fundamentally different cultural environment is asking for something to backfire. (For a brief theoretical discussion, see http://shadowedforest.blogspot.com/2008/04/calculus-of-external-intervention-in.html.)
Bush seems to have decided to intensify his aggressive, militant course of frontal confrontation with Islamic political actors who do not submit to U.S. leadership, as suggested by U.S. behavior in recent months toward Pakistan, Somalia, Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, and Israel. (For background details, see http://shadowedforest.blogspot.com/2008/03/washington-intensifying-its.html.) You have provided intriguing recent details supporting this hypothesis.
Countries always face choices about whether to lean toward confrontation or conciliation in their efforts to influence each other, but there are many ways to be confrontational. Doing it in the back alleys (literally) or in the back alleys of local politics are probably the two most complicated ways.
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